Johnny Ludlow, Fourth Series

Valentine took his place in his father’s room; and the clerks, who had been hail-fellow-well-met with him hitherto, put on respect of manner, and called him Mr. Chandler. Tom had an errand to do every Monday morning connected with the business, and did not enter until nearly eleven o’clock. Before settling to his desk, he went in to Valentine.

They shook hands. In times of bereavement we are apt to observe more ceremony than at others. Tom sat down: which caused the new master to look towards him inquiringly.

“Valentine, I want to have a bit of talk with you. Upon what footing am I to be on here?”

“How do you mean?” asked Valentine: who was leaning back in the green leather chair with the air of his new importance full upon him, his elbows on the low arms, and an ivory paper-knife held between his fingers.

“My uncle Jacob told me that from henceforth I was to assume my right place here, Valentine. I suppose it will be so.”

“What do you call your right place?” cried Valentine.

“Well, my right place would be head of the office,” replied Tom, speaking, as he always did, cordially and pleasantly. “But I don’t wish to be exacting. Make me your partner, Valentine, and give me the second place in the firm.”

“Can’t do it, old fellow,” said Valentine, in tones which seemed to say he would like to joke the matter off. “The practice was my father’s, and it is now mine.”

“But you know that part of it ought to have been mine from the first, Valentine. That is, from the time I have been of an age to succeed to it.”

“I don’t know it, I’m sure, Tom. If it ‘ought’ to have been yours, I suppose my father would have given it to you. He was able to judge.”

Tom dropped his voice. “He sent for me that last day of his life, you know, Valentine. It was to tell me he had not done the right thing by me, but that it should be done now: that he had charged you to do it.”

“Ah,” said Valentine, carelessly, “worn-out old men take up odd fancies—fit for a lunatic asylum. My poor father must have been spent with disease, though not with age: but we did not know it.”

“Will you make me your partner?”

“No, Tom, I can’t. The practice was all my father’s, and the practice must be mine. Look here: on that same day you speak of he sent for John Paul to add a codicil to his will. Now it stands to reason that if he had wished me to take you into the firm, he would have mentioned it in that codicil and bound me down to do it.”

“And he did not?”

“Not a word of it. You are quite welcome to read the will. It is a very short and simple one: leaving what property he had to my mother, and the business and office furniture to me. The codicil Paul wrote was to decree that I should pay my mother a certain sum out of the profits. Your name is not mentioned in the will at all, from beginning to end.”

Tom made no reply. Valentine continued.

“The object of his tying me down to pay over to my mother a portion of the profits is, because she has not enough to live on without it. There need be no secret about it. I am to give her a third of the income I make, whatsoever it may be.”

“One final word, Valentine: will you be just and take me in?”

“No, Tom, I cannot. And there’s another thing. I don’t wish to be mean, I’m sure; it’s not in my nature: but with all my own expenses upon me and this third that I must hand over to my people, I fear I shall not be able to continue to give your mother the hundred and fifty a-year that my father has allowed her so long.”

“You cannot help yourself, Valentine. That much is provided for in the original partnership deed, and you are bound by it.”

“No,” dissented Valentine, flicking a speck off the front of his black coat. “My father might have been bound by it, but I am not. Now that the two original partners are dead, the deed is cancelled, don’t you see. It is not binding upon me.”

“I think you are mistaken: but I will leave that question for this morning. Is your decision, not to give me a share, final?”

“It is.”

“Let me make one remark. You say the codicil stipulates that you shall pay a third of the profits to your mother—and it is a very just and right thing to do. Valentine, rely upon it, that your father’s last intentions were that, of the other two-thirds left, one of them should be mine.”

Valentine flushed red. He had a florid complexion at all times, something like salmon-colour. Very different from Tom’s, which was clear and healthy.

“We won’t talk any more about it, Tom. How you can get such crotchets into your head, I can’t imagine. If you sit there till midday, I can say no more than I have said: I cannot take you into partnership.”

“Then I shall leave you,” said Tom, rising. He was a fine-looking young fellow, standing there with his arm on the back of the client’s chair, in which he had sat; tall and straight. His good, honest face had a shade of pain in it, as it gazed straight out to Valentine’s. He looked his full six-and-twenty years.

“Well, I wish you would leave me, Tom,” replied Valentine, carelessly. “I have heaps to do this morning.”

“Leave the office, I mean. Leave you for good.”

“Nonsense!”

“Though your father did not give me the rights that were my just due, I remained on, expecting and hoping that he would give them some time. It was my duty to remain with him; at least, my mother told me so; and perhaps my interest. But the case is changed now. I will not stay with you, Valentine, unless you do me justice; I shall leave you now. Now, this hour.”

“But you can’t, Tom. You would put me to frightful inconvenience.”

“And what inconvenience—inconvenience for life—are you putting me to, Valentine? You take my prospects from me. The position that ought to be mine, here at Islip, you refuse to let me hold. This was my father’s practice; a portion of it, at least, ought to be mine. I will not continue to be a servant where I ought to be a master.”

“Then you must go,” said Valentine.

Tom held out his hand. “Good-bye. I do not part in enmity.”

“Good-bye, Tom. I’m sorry: but it’s your fault.”

Tom Chandler went into the office where he had used to sit, opened his desk, and began putting up what things belonged to him. They made a tolerable-sized parcel. Valentine, left in his chair of state, sat on in a brown study. All the inconvenience that Tom’s leaving him would be productive of was flashing into his mind. Tom had been, under old Jacob, the prop and stay of the business; knew about everything, and had a clear head for details. He himself was different—and Valentine was never more sure of the fact than at this moment. There are lawyers and lawyers. Tom was one, Valentine was another. He, Valentine, had never much cared for business; he liked pleasure a great deal better. Indulged always by both father and mother, he had grown up self-indulgent. It was all very fine to perch himself in that chair and play the master; but he knew that, without Tom to direct things, for some time to come he should be three-parts lost. But, as to making him a partner and giving him a share? “No,” concluded Valentine emphatically, “I won’t do it.”

Tom, carrying his paper parcel, left the house and crossed the road to the post-office, which was higher up the street, to post a letter he had hastily written. It was addressed to a lawyer at Worcester. A week or two before, Tom, being at Worcester, was asked by this gentleman if he would take the place of head clerk and manager in his office. The question was put jokingly, for the lawyer supposed Tom to be a fixture at Islip: but Tom saw that he would have been glad for him to take the berth. He hoped it might still be vacant. What with one thing and another, beginning with the injustice done him at the old place and his anxiety to get into another without delay, Tom felt more bothered than he had ever felt in his life. The tempting notion of setting-up somewhere for himself came into his mind. But it went out of it again: he could not afford to risk any waste of time, with his mother’s home to keep up, and especially with this threat of Valentine’s to stop her hundred and fifty pounds a-year income.

“How do you do, Mr. Chandler?”

At the sound of the pretty voice, Tom turned short round from the post-office window, which was a stationer’s, to see a charming girl all ribbons and muslins, with sky-blue eyes and bright hair. Tom took the hand only half held out to him.

“I beg your pardon, Emma: I was reading this concert bill. The idea of Islip’s getting up a concert!”

She was the only child of John Paul the lawyer, and had as fair a face as you’d wish to see, and a habit of blushing at nothing. To watch her as she stood there, the roses coming and going, the dimples deepening, and the small white teeth peeping, did Tom good. He was reddening himself, for that matter.

“Yes, it is to be given in the large club-room at the Bell to-night,” she answered. “Shall you come over for it?”

“Are you going to it, Emma?”

“Oh yes. Papa has taken twelve tickets. A great many people are coming in to go with us.”

“I shall go also,” said Tom decidedly. And at that the roses came again.

“What a large parcel you are carrying!”

Tom held the brown-paper parcel further out at the remark.

“They are my goods and chattels,” said he. “Things that I had at the office. I have left it, Emma.”

“Left the office!” she repeated, looking as though she did not understand. “You don’t mean really left it?—left it for good?”

“I have left it for good, Emma. Valentine–”

“Here’s papa,” interrupted Emma, as a stout, elderly gentleman with iron-grey hair turned out of the stationer’s; neither of them having the least idea he was there.

“Is it you, Tom Chandler?” cried Mr. Paul.

“Yes, it is, sir.”

“And fine to be you, I should say! Spending your time in gossip at the busiest part of the day.”

“Unfortunately I have to-day no business to do,” returned Tom, smiling in the old lawyer’s face. “And I was just telling Miss Paul why. I have left the office, sir, and am looking out for another situation.”

Mr. Paul stared at him. “Why, it is your own office. What’s that for?”

“It ought to be my own office in part, as it was my father’s before me. But Valentine cannot see that, sir. He tells me he will not take me into partnership; that I ought not to expect it. I refuse to remain on any other terms; and so I have left him for good. These are my rattletraps. Odds and ends of things that I am bringing away.”

Mr. Paul continued to look at Tom in silence for a minute or two. Tom thought he was considering what he should next say. It was not that, however. “How well he would suit me! How I should like to take him! What a load of work he’d lift off my shoulders!” Those were the thoughts that were running rapidly through Mr. Paul’s mind.

But he did not speak them. In fact, he had no intention of speaking them, or of taking on Tom, much as he would have liked to do it.

“When Jacob Chandler lay dying only yesterday, as it were, he told me you would join his son; that the two of you would carry on the practice together.”

“Yes, he said the same thing to me,” replied Tom. “But Valentine refuses to carry it out. So I told him I would not be a servant where I ought to be a master, and came away.”

“And what are you going to do, young man?”

Tom smiled. He was just as much a lawyer as Mr. Paul was. “I should like to set up in practice for myself,” he answered; “but I do not yet see my way sufficiently clear to do so. There may be a chance for me at Worcester, as managing clerk. I have written to ask if the place is filled up. May I join your party to the concert to-night, sir?” he asked.

“I don’t mind—if you are going to it,” said the old lawyer: “but I can’t see what young men want at concerts?”

Tom caught Miss Emma’s eye and her blushes, and gave her a glance that told her he should be sure to come.

But, before the lapse of twenty-four hours, in spite of his non-intention, Mr. Paul had taken on Tom Chandler and, looking back in later years, it might be seen that it had been on the cards of destiny that Tom should be taken.

“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,Rough-hew them how we will.”

Lawyer Paul was still in his dining-room that evening in his handsome house just out of Islip, and before any of his expected guests had come, when Tom arrived to say he could not make one, and was shown into the drawing-room. Feasting his eyes with Miss Emma’s charming dress, and shaking her hand longer than was at all polite, Tom told her why he could not go.

“My mother took me to task severely, Emma. She asked me what I could be thinking of to wish to go to a public concert when my uncle was only buried the day before yesterday. The truth is, I never thought of that.”

“I am so sorry,” whispered Emma. “But I am worse than you are. It was I who first asked whether you meant to go. And it is to be the nicest concert imaginable!”

“I don’t care for the concert,” avowed Tom. “I—I should like to have gone to it, though.”

“At least you—you will stay and take some tea,” suggested Emma.

“If I may.”

“Would you please loose my hand?” went on Emma. “The lace has caught in your sleeve-button.”

“I’ll undo it,” said Tom. “What pretty lace it is! Is it Valenciennes? My mother thinks there’s no lace like Valenciennes.”

“It is only pillow,” replied Emma, bending her face over the lace and the buttons. “After you left this morning, papa said he wished he had remembered to ask you where he could get a prospectus of those water-works. He–”

“Mrs. and Miss Maceveril,” interrupted a servant, opening the door to show in some ladies.

So the interview was over; and Tom took the opportunity to go to the lawyer’s dining-room, and tell him about the water-works.

“You have come over from Crabb to go to this fine concert!” cried Mr. Paul, sipping his port wine; which he always took out of a claret-glass. Though never more than one glass, he would be half-an-hour over it.

“I have come to say I can’t go to it,” replied Tom. “My mother thinks it would not be seemly so soon after Uncle Jacob’s death.”

“Quite right of her, too. Why don’t you sit down? No wine? Well, sit down all the same. I want to talk to you. Will you come into my office?”

The proposal was so sudden, so unexpected, that Tom scarcely knew what to make of it. He did not know that Mr. Paul’s office wanted him.

“I have been thinking upon matters since I saw you this morning, Tom Chandler. I am growing elderly; some people would say old; and the thought has often crossed me that it might be as well if I had some one about me different from an ordinary clerk. Were I laid aside by illness to-morrow the conduct of the business would still lie upon me; and lie it must, unless I get a confidential manager, who is a qualified lawyer: one who can act in my place without reference to me. I offer you the post; and I will give you, to begin with, two hundred a-year.”

“I should like it of all things,” cried Tom in delight, eyes and face sparkling. “I am used to Islip and don’t care to leave it. Yes, sir, I will come with the greatest pleasure.”

“Then that’s settled,” said old Paul.

Just about two years had gone on, and it was hot summer again. In the same room at North Villa where poor Thomas Chandler had died, sat Valentine Chandler and his mother. It was evening, and the window was open to the garden. In another room, its window also open, sat the three girls, Georgiana, Clementina, and Julietta; all of them singing and playing and squalling.

“Not talk about business on a Sunday night! You must have grown wonderfully serious all on a sudden!” exclaimed Mrs. Chandler, tartly. “I never get to see you except on a Sunday: you know that, Valentine.”

“It is not often I can get time to come over on a week-day,” responded Valentine, helping himself to some spirits and water, which had been placed on the table after supper. “Business won’t let me.”

“If all I hear be true, it is not business that hinders you,” said Mrs. Chandler. “Be quiet, Valentine: I must speak. I have put it off and off, disliking to do it; but I must speak at last. Your business, as I am told, is falling off alarmingly; that a great deal of it has gone over to John Paul.”

“Who told you?”

“That is beyond the question, Valentine, and I am not going to make mischief. Is it true, or is it not true?”

“A little of the practice went over to Paul when Tom left me. It was not much. Some of the clients, you see, had been accustomed to Tom at our place, and they followed him. That was a crafty move of John Paul’s—getting hold of Tom.”

“I am not alluding to the odds and ends of practice that left you then, Valentine. I speak chiefly of this last year. Hardly a week has passed in it but some client or other has left you for Paul.”

“If they have, I can’t help it,” was the careless reply. “How those girls squall!”

“I suppose there is no underhand influence at work, Valentine?” she said dubiously. “Tom Chandler does not hold out baits for your clients, and so fish them away from you?”

“Well, no, I suppose not,” repeated the young lawyer, draining his glass. “I accused Tom of it one day, and for once in his life he flew into a passion, asking me what I had ever seen in him to suspect he could be guilty of such a thing.”

“No. I fear it is as I have been given to understand, Valentine: that the cause lies with you. You spend your time in pleasure instead of being at business. When clients go to the office, three times out of every five they do not find you. You are not there. You are over at the Bell, playing at billiards, or drinking in the bar.”

“What an unfounded calumny!” exclaimed Valentine.

“I have been told,” continued Mrs. Chandler, sinking her voice, “that you are getting to drink frightfully. It is nothing for clients now to find you in a state incapable of attending to them.”

“Now, mother, I insist upon knowing who told you these lies,” spluttered Valentine, getting up and striding to the window. “Let anybody come forward and prove that he has found me incapable—if he can.”

“I heard that Sir John Whitney went in the other day and could make neither top nor tail of what you said,” continued his mother, disregarding his denial. “You are agent for the little bit of property he owns here: he chanced to come over from Whitney Hall, and found you like that.”

“I’ll write to Sir John Whitney and ask what he means by saying it.”

“He did not say it—that I know of. Others were witnesses of your state as well as he.”

“If my clerks tell tales out of my office, I’ll discharge them from it,” burst forth Valentine, too angry to notice the tacit admission his words gave. “Not the clerks, you say? Then why don’t you–”

“Do be still, Valentine. Putting yourself out like this will do no good. I hope it is not true: if you assure me it is not, I am ready to believe you. All I spoke for was, to caution you, and to tell you what is being said, that you may be on your guard. Leave off going to the Bell; stick to business instead: people will soon cease talking then.”

“I dare say they will!” growled Valentine.

“If you are always at your post, ready to confer with clients, they would have no plea for leaving you and going to Paul. For all our sakes, Valentine, you must do this.”

“And so I do. If–”

“Hush! The girls are coming in. I hear them shutting the piano.”

Valentine dashed out a second supply, and drank it, not caring whether it contained most brandy or water. We are never so angry as when conscience accuses us: and it was accusing him.

In came the young ladies, laughing, romping, and pushing one another; Georgiana, Clementina, and Julietta, arrayed in all the colours of the rainbow. The chief difference Sunday made to them was, that their smartest clothes came out.

Mrs. Chandler’s accusations were right, and Valentine’s denials wrong. During the past two years he had been drifting downwards. The Bell was getting to possess so great a fascination for him that he could not keep away from it more than a couple of hours together. It was nothing for him to be seen playing billiards in the morning, or lounging in the parlour or the bar-room, drinking. One of his clerks would come interrupting him with news that some client was waiting at the office, and Valentine would put down his cue or his glass, and go flying over. But clients, as a rule, don’t like this kind of reception: they expect to find their legal advisers cool and ready on the spot.

The worst of all was the drink. Valentine had made a friend of it so long now, that he did not attempt to do without it. Thought he could not. Where he at first drank one glass he went on to drink two glasses, and the two gave place to three, or to more. Of course it told upon him. It told now and then upon his manner in the daytime: which was unfortunate. He could leave his billiards behind him and his glass, but he could not leave the effects of what the glass had contained; and it was no uncommon thing now for his clients, when he did go rushing in to them, to find his speech uncertain and his brains in a muddle. As a natural result, the practice was passing over to John Paul as fast as it could: and Tom, who was chief manager at Paul’s now, had been obliged to take on an extra clerk. Every day of his life old Paul told himself how lucky his move of engaging Tom had turned out. And this, not for the extra business he had gained: a great deal of that might have come to him whether Tom was with him or not: but because Tom had eased his shoulders of their hard work and care, and because he, the old man, had grown to like him so much.

But never a word had Mr. Paul said about raising Tom’s salary. Tom supposed he did not intend to raise it. And, much as he liked his post, and, for many reasons, his stay at Islip, he entertained notions of quitting both. Valentine had stopped the income his father had paid to Mrs. Chandler; and Tom’s two hundred a-year, combined with the trifle remaining to her out of her private income, only just sufficed to keep the home going.

It chanced that on the very same Sunday evening, when they were talking at North Villa of Valentine’s doings, Tom broached the subject to his mother. They were sitting out of doors in the warm summer twilight, sniffing the haycocks in the neighbouring field. Tom spoke abruptly.

“Should you mind my going to London, mother?”

“To London!” cried Mrs. Chandler. “What for?”

“To live.”

“You—you are not leaving Mr. Paul, are you?”

“I am thinking of it. You see, mother mine, there is no prospect of advancement where I am. It seems to me that I may jog on for ever at two hundred a-year–”

“It is enough for us, Tom.”

“As things are, yes: but nothing more. If—for instance—if I wanted to set up a home of my own, I have no means of doing it. Never shall have, at the present rate.”

Mrs. Chandler turned and looked at Tom’s face. “Are you thinking of marrying, Tom?”

“No. It is of no use to think of it. If I thought of it ever so, I could not do it. Putting that idea aside, it occurs to me sometimes to remember that I am eight-and-twenty, and ought to be doing better for myself.”

“Do you fancy you could do better in London?”

“I am sure I could. Very much better.”

Opening the Bible on her lap, Mrs. Chandler took out the spectacles that lay between the leaves, and put them into their case with trembling fingers.

“Do whatever you think best, Tom,” she said at length, having waited to steady her voice. “Children leave their parents’ home for one of their own; this Book tells us that they should do so. Had Jacob Chandler done the right thing by you, you would never have needed to leave Islip: had his son done the right thing by me, I should not be the burden to you that I am. But now that George has taken to sending me money over from Canada–”

“Burden!” interrupted Tom, laughingly. “Don’t you talk treason, Mrs. Chandler. If I do go to London, you will have to come with me, and see the lions.”

That night, lying awake, Tom made his mind up. He had been offered a good appointment in London to manage a branch office for a large legal firm—four hundred a-year salary. And he would never for a moment have hesitated to take it, but for not liking to leave old Paul and (especially) old Paul’s daughter.

Walking to Islip the next morning, he thought a bit about the best way of breaking it to Mr. Paul—who would be sure to come down upon him with a storm. By midday he had found no opportunity of speaking: people were perpetually coming in: and in the afternoon Tom had to go a mile or two into the country. In returning he overtook Emma. She was walking along the field-path under the hedge, her hat hanging on her arm by its strings.